Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. By Jeffrey D Sachs, Penguin/Allen Lane, €27

The world has faced many crises and threats over the years, ranging from famine to the spectre of nuclear Armageddon to Aids. Most of these crises have been tackled head on, with a reasonable degree of success, but there is always a sense that more could and should have been done.

The inhabitants of this planet are now facing a crisis that has the potential to dwarf all of the others - the physical threat to the world from environmental damage. In the foreword to this book, Professor Edward O Wilson of Harvard argues that all the crises that afflict the world economy are ultimately environmental in origin.

These include ‘‘climatic change, pollution, water shortage, defoliation, decline of arable soil, depletion of marine fisheries, tightening of petroleum sources, persistent pockets of severe poverty, the threat of pandemics, and a dangerous disparity of resource appropriation within and between nations’’.

This is a lengthy list that would scare even the most sanguine among us, but it is difficult to argue with any of these, and it is incumbent on this generation to tackle the lot in an aggressive and effective fashion. It is time for the talking to end and the action to begin.

In Common Wealth, Jeffrey Sachs, the renowned economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, explores all these issues and others.

For those who lobby governments on the need to address the big issue of the environment, and indeed for policy makers seeking to raise public awareness, the constant dilemma is how to couch the argument in a manner that will spell out the magnitude of the issues, without creating a level of fear and desperation that could result in inaction.

It is important to identify the issues and lay out solutions that give cause for hope, for hope is a prerequisite for achievement.

Sachs’ latest offering manages to strike an impressive balance between fear and hope. His primary argument is that the self-organising forces of a market economy should be primarily guided by the principles of social justice and environmental regulation. He argues that issues such as the pressures on scarce energy resources, growing environmental stresses, the rising global population, migratory flows, shifting economic power and vast inequalities of income have the potential to cause a devastating clash of civilisations, unless there is global co-operation in addressing them.

According to Sachs, such co-operation has worked well in the past. He cites the formation of the United Nations, the eradication of smallpox, global campaigns to immunise children against various diseases, and, indeed, the ending of the Cold War as examples where global co-operation on a shared vision worked. On the other hand, he believes that the first great wave of globalisation, in the 19th century, culminated in the blood-soaked trenches of World War I because of the paradox of a unified global economy and divided global society.

The scope of what Sachs seeks to cover in this book is vast, encompassing control of population growth, securing water, ensuring that the human species’ hunger for resources does not continue to be the single most destructive force on earth for other species, designing a proper economic development strategy, ending global poverty traps and changing the focus of foreign policy.

He is particularly critical of American foreign policy, and he identifies six steps that the US must take to transform its security policy into a framework that will work for the 21st century.

These include the embracing of multilateralism and international law, the shifting of finance from the military to the development budget, addressing demography and the environment, the creation of a framework for nuclear nonproliferation, understanding the Middle East and creating a department of international sustainable development. The implication is that none of these issues is currently embraced by US foreign policy.

This is a list that will not please Bush’s neocons, but it is one that Obama and, to a lesser extent, Clinton, would be willing to embrace, and hopefully they will, if given the chance.

While some people with rightwing leanings tend to write off Sachs as a liberal leftie, or criticise him in the mistaken belief that many of his views are not empirically supported, this book is a masterpiece.

It is essential reading for anybody who wishes to understand the key challenges facing the world. There is not a lot here that has not been written about before, but Sachs brings it all together in a very cogent, user-friendly and interesting way.

I loved this book and will re-read it again and again, in order to keep the compelling message at the top of my thought process. That message is the need for sustainable economic development, which can only be achieved through global co-operation.

My big reservation about his whole thesis is that it smacks of utopianism, because I am deeply sceptical about the appetite for the sort of co-operation and the belief in the ‘‘power of one’’ that is needed to address the challenge in a meaningful way. Hopefully, my scepticism will be misplaced.

Jim Power is chief economist with Friends First